THE KREMLIN: Nerve Centre of Russian History

KIRKUS REVIEW

Blood. Blood. Blood. Dead bodies. Madness. A thousand-year-old iron maiden for physical torture. Such is Mr. Alexandrov's Kremlin, ""nerve-centre of Russian history"". From its very foundation, the Kremlin has been a death house in which rulers processed millions of murders. Prisoners give false confessions happily and scramble up to the gallows to get their neck in a noose and die unmutilated. In this history, which covers every ruler who occupied the building, only two men ever governed the country who were not mad with blood lust (the short-reigning Michael Romanov and the False Dmitri.) The empresses were often worse. Death is whist or pinochle to these madmen. Mr. Alexandrov seems to have ferreted out the bones of every corpse that ended under the Kremlin's walls, but he has not written the large, brooding, definitive work this horror-castle deserves. He mentions none of the treasures held there, almost never describes nor gives the feel of a room, and ignores completely the art-work covering the building's endless walls. His interests are more political, or red-blooded, as his flocks of exclamation points testify.

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